When Kasparov played Deep Blue in chess in 1996, was it esports?
Not trying to just be cheeky here, the question alludes to something I’m trying to unpack about the idea of esports: how essential to the whole concept are videogames as cultural phenomena?
Clearly, the primary stakeholders in esports currently are folks from videogames—publishers, developers, event producers, fans—it is videogame competitions.
As @ibogost occasionally reminds me, that’s the point for many. It’s counter-culture (though not really). At least, it’s the anti-sports for many. I often argue the data suggests otherwise, that esports fans also like traditional sports, but that’s up for debate.
But I wonder, if we disentangle esports from videogames and focus instead on the digital mediation of sports, maybe that would open up some meaningful insights about where it is all headed? Maybe esports is a natural step in the general digitization of sport?
You see this with digital motor sports a bit, where the rhetoric is about simulation. Coming back to @ibogost, even argued in two books about FIFA and Madden and other sports simulation games that they are more related ontologically to the sports themselves than games per se.
I think about this a lot at work @sportsilab where we work with traditional sports organizations to understand what to think or do about esports. So much emphasis is on the professionalization of videogame competitions. But what about the digital mediation of all sports?
When you take a step away from the videogame-ness of esports, you open up a whole world of potential digital media innovation: HUDs, AR, VR, digital fields, digital floors, immersive fan experiences, safety technology, so much.
And a lot of this innovation is already happening in the videogames, it becomes a question of how those move from the videogame space to the traditional sports space through continuous digital mediation.
This makes sense to me because the digital mediation is already happening, and has been happening. Instant Replay. Shot Clocks. F1 data in cockpit. VAR in soccer. Hawk-Eye in tennis. K-Zone. This puts esports into a different historical context in closer relation to trad sports.
The convergence is for the pros and for the fans. I think there’s a future wherein we watch the NFL in Madden, playing and watching at the same time, seamlessly moving back and forth between the real and speculative. It’s coming. Look at @fcflio, for example.
Not to get too overblown here, but I think this is the future of sports. Watching & playing simultaneously. Interacting with digital media used in competiton. Spectating and producing speculative historiography at the same time. Should Seattle have run the ball? Try it yourself.
